Falling On Your Sword Can Remedy Even The Worst PR Disaster

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer standing at the door to a United Airlines plane, sipping a Pepsi. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and it assuredly is, then that would be the picture for the recent days.

(Photo: Timothy Fadek/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

United Airlines forcibly "re-accommodated" a Vietnamese-American physician out of the seat he had paid for on an oversold flight in Chicago, smashed his face against an arm rest, broke his nose and some teeth, then blamed him for being "disruptive."

Pepsi's in-house "creative team" put together a commercial featuring one of the Kardashian Cretin Crew modelling, then rushing outside to join a passing protest, with lots of knowing nods and fist-bumps ensuing. The Kardsahian Cretin -- famous-for-nothing Kendall Jenner, who later insisted she was "traumatized" by the ensuing mean tweets -- hands a grateful cop a can of Pepsi, and all is well in the world.

Standing before the assembled White House -- all of them agog and agape -- Spicer said: "You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." Immediately, the Anne Frank Centre and many others demanded Spicer be fired. Spicer retracted, apologized, blah blah blah.

Quite a week, eh? It all reminded me of a long-ago Canadian equivalent. During the 2000 federal election campaign, former Canadian Alliance Leader Stockwell Day -- who, it should be noted, this writer always thought bore more than a passing resemblance to Dan Quayle, of potato/potatoe infamy -- decided to use Niagara Falls as a backdrop to a campaign announcement.

The lesson is that candidates/companies/communicators should 'fess up, laugh at themselves, then move on.

Missing a golden opportunity to poke fun at himself, and thereby seem as human, Day darkly warned that he would "check the record, and if someone has wrongly informed me about the flow of this particular water, I'll be having a pretty interesting discussion with them." So, not only did Day succeed in making himself look like a dummy, he also came across sounding like a dummy who couldn't take responsibility for his own mistakes.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer answers reporters' questions at the White House April 11, 2017 in Washington, DC. Spicer said that different from Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler did not use chemical weapons. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The lesson, naturally, is that candidates/companies/communicators should, if the circumstances warrant, 'fess up, laugh at themselves, then move on. Periodically falling on one's sword is an excellent strategy. Always.

In this writer's experience, voters and consumers are forgiving. They are profoundly aware of the tendency of humans to have human failings, being human beings themselves. And, as long as mistakes are not being made all the time -- cf. Messrs. Day, Quayle and Spicer, above -- they will forgive and forget and move on.

Apologies cost nothing. Retractions are free. Once given -- unequivocally, sincerely, directly and without condition -- they have magical healing powers.

But the best approach, of course, is to avoid making the dumb mistake in the first place.

Sean Spicer, sipping a Pepsi on that United flight to ignominy, would certainly agree.